Posts Tagged 'CISO'

Security breaches have made front-page news in recent months. With stories about Target, Neiman Marcus, Yahoo! and GoDaddy in the headlines recently, the importance of good information security practices is becoming harder and harder to ignore — even for smaller businesses. Moving your business into the cloud offers a plethora of benefits; however, those benefits do not come without their challenges. Moving your business into the cloud involves risks such as multi-tenancy, so it's important to be able to properly manage and identify these risks.

1. Know the Security Your Provider Offers
While some SaaS providers may have security baked-in, most IaaS providers (including SoftLayer) leave much of the logical security responsibility of a customer's systems to the customer. For the security measures that an infrastructure provider handles, the provider should be able to deliver documentation attesting these controls. We perform an annual SOC2 audit, so we can attest to the status of our security and availability controls as a service organization. With this information, our customers use controls from our report as part of their own compliance requirements. Knowing a provider's security controls (and seeing proof of that security) allows business owners and Chief Information Security Officers (CISO) to have peace-of-mind that they can properly plan their control activities to better prevent or respond to a breach.

2. Use the Cloud to Distribute and Replicate Your Presence
The incredible scalability and geographical distribution of operating in the cloud can yield some surprising payoff. Experts in the security industry are leveraging the cloud to reduce their patch cycles to days, not weeks or months. Most cloud providers have multiple sites so that you can spread your presence nationally, or even globally. With this kind of infrastructure footprint, businesses can replicate failover systems and accommodate regional demand across multiple facilities with the minimal incremental investment (and with nearly identical security controls).

3. Go Back to the Basics
Configuration management. Asset management. Separation of duties. Strong passwords. Many organizations get so distracted by the big picture of their security measures that they fail to manage these basic rights. Take advantage of any of your provider's tools to assist in the ‘mundane’ tasks that are vitally important to your business's overall security posture. For example, you can use image templates or post-provisioning scripts to deploy a standard baseline configuration to your systems, then track them down to the specific server room. You’ll know what hardware is in your server at all times, and if you're using SoftLayer, you can even drill down to the serial numbers of your hard drives.

4. Have Sound Incident Response Plans
The industry is becoming increasingly cognizant of the fact that it’s not a matter of if, but when a security threat will present itself. Even with exceedingly high levels of baked-in security, most of the recent breaches resulted from a compromised employee. Be prepared to respond to security incidents with confidence. While you may be physically distanced from your systems, you should be able to meet defined Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) for your services.

5. Maintain Constant Contact with Your Cloud Provider
Things happen. No amount of planning can completely halt every incident, whether it be a natural disaster or a determined attacker. Know that your hosting provider has your back when things take an unexpected turn.

With proper planning and good practice, the cloud isn't as risky and frightening as most think. If you're interested in learning a little more about the best practices around security in the cloud, check out the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA). The CSA provides a wealth of knowledge to assist business owners and security professionals alike. Build on the strengths, compensate for the weaknesses, and you and your CISO will be able to sleep at night (and maybe even sneak in a beer after work).